Chapter 7 Learning Log

What?
Today’s lecture covered constructivism. This involves learning as an active process in which the learners construct their own meaning based on prior knowledge and experiences. Piaget would favor the idea that individuals construct their own meaning, while Vygotsy would say that society helps individuals to construct meanings. Today in class during the bell quiz, we had an object lesson of social constructivism. As we found out, it was much better to be able to have other class members to work with on our answers then answering them solely on our own. As a class, we were able to construct the meaning of what we had read in chapter 7 and make some sense of it.

Schema plays a big role in our learning as demonstrated by the paragraph that we read. At first, I thought the paragraph was about a girl doing homework and then friends came over to play games. Then upon further examination I thought that it was a group of musicians getting together to play instruments. I never thought that it was about a baseball game as some in class did. This exercise demonstrated that prior knowledge makes a difference in what we learn.
For an activity on developing a schema, our group was given the word “family” to define. We had a very difficult time trying to come up with something that we all felt comfortable with. In the end, we consulted Google and got a satisfactory definition of “A social unit living together.”

I liked the discovery learning example. I felt that the students were given enough direction to lead them to the conclusions the teacher wanted. I also felt that the students were going to remember the rectangles they built and retain the knowledge longer than if the teacher would have just told them the factors of 12. The students used more than just the ears to hear, they used their hands, worked in groups, and I hope made a better connection to the content.

So What?
As an educator, I need to understand and used different theories of learning to help meet the needs of all my students. What might work well with some students, might not work so well with others. I need to remember these theories and integrate them into my teaching style in order to reach as many students as possible. I need to remember the power of schema! Students will come from diverse backgrounds and I do not want to make any assumptions that everyone knows the same things. I need to evaluate, question, and find out what ideas and schema my student have and begin my teaching from there. Many times, I may need to correct misconceptions that students have in their schema. When I was a child, it would have been easy to describe the word “family” as what would have been considered a traditional family. However, today there are so many more ideas that make up this word. I need to carefully consider each student and their family situation making sure all students aware of the many aspects that make a family.

Now What?
As I prepare to become a teacher, I need to really understand and apply the appropriate theories to my lessons. I need to constantly ponder and evaluate if the methods I employ in my teaching are effective and meeting the needs of my students. As I begin teaching, I believe I will find where my students might have misconceptions in their schemas and I can learn to anticipate where I may need to focus my attentions. It will be important for me to watch for differing schemas through questions, testing, and surveying. I will need to use the existing schema for a basis of my lessons. As I prepare my lessons, I need to be sensitive to the diversity of students I will teach and find the appropriate theories and strategies that will help them learn. I would like to incorporate some discovery learning into my classroom as I believe that hands on experiences help reinforce concept attainment.